Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Let us think of the more moral members of society as a moral elite, much as the generality of scientists form a scientific elite. I hope I do not need to stress that such a moral elite must not be confused with a social or intellectual elite. I am myself not so heroic. I eat eggs though they may come from battery hens.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 10, 2009

He seems to think that the demand for free-range pork is a demand for wild pork, when in fact it's a demand for morally acceptable conditions for the pigs. In other words, people want to eat not wild pigs but domestic pigs raised in humane conditions.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 30, 2011

But when a moral being is feeling a pleasure or pain that is deserved or undeserved, or a pleasure or pain that implies a good or a bad disposition, the total fact is quite inadequately described if we say 'a sentient being is feeling pleasure, or pain'. Pleasure is good when, and only when, it is deserved.

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Morals Indianapolis Humane Suffering 40

Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 15, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. Most moral vegetarians list fish and fowl as animals one should not eat. The ability to feel pain is not an obviously plausible way of morally distinguishing microorganisms from other organisms. What Meat Should Not Be Eaten?

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 9, 2012

Surely any sentient or conscious being has states that matter to it in a positive or negative way—pleasure matters to an animal in a positive way, pain or fear in a negative way. Given the logic of morality, we should extend our moral attention to those states that matter to it when our actions affect that being.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Glass-Walled Slaughter Houses Mel Morse, former president of the Humane Society of the United States, once remarked: “If every one of our slaughter houses were constructed of glass this would be a nation of vegetarians.”

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 27, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. ARGUMENTS FOR MORAL VEGETARIANISM A variety of arguments have been given for vegetarianism. Sometimes they take such a sketchy form that it is not completely clear they are moral arguments. Tags: Moral Vegetarianism.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 31, 2008

There is a difficulty about drawing from all this a moral for ourselves. But then we can say this because we can say that all those are bad moralities, whereas we cannot look at our own moralities and declare them bad. It is natural to feel sympathy for animals who are suffering. This is bad faith.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 30, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Human Grain Shortage All of the clearly moral arguments for vegetarianism given so far have been in terms of animal rights and suffering.

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 8, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. What Is an Animal Part? The last example suggests the difficulty of making a clear distinction between an animal part and an animal product. They suggest that any simple moral vegetarianism is impossible.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 4, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. In fact, animals used for food do suffer a great deal. KBJ: Singer’s claim is that one should not contribute, even incrementally, to animal suffering. Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 19, 2009

In the past I have been concerned to advocate a normative utilitarian theory from the point of view of a non-cognitivist meta-ethics. I assumed that Hume was right in thinking that ultimately morality depends on how we feel about things. I described the feelings to which I wished to appeal as "generalized benevolence."

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Animal Ethics

MAY 25, 2008

One restriction on the absolutism of man's rule over Nature is now generally accepted: moral philosophers and public opinion agree that it is morally impermissible to be cruel to animals. That, on the whole, is the Christian tradition. Controversies no doubt remain.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 17, 2008

What the utilitarian who defends human carnivorousness must say, then, is something like this: that the amount of pleasure which humans derive per pound of animal flesh exceeds the amount of discomfort and pain per pound which are inflicted on the animals in the process, all things taken into account. Is this plausible?

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 12, 2009

It was, I suggest, to a large extent because he felt that the noblest feature of humanity is the capacity to be self-governing, to adopt principles without being influenced by sensuous motives and then to live by them whatever the contingencies. Kant's ethics is as much an ethics of self-esteem as it is an ethics of duty.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 17, 2008

Peter Singer , "Killing Humans and Killing Animals," Inquiry 22 [summer 1979]: 145-56, at 152 [endnote omitted]) Note from KBJ: Singer is making a distinction within the class of sentient beings. Suppose humans are self-conscious. Self-consciousness is morally significant; species, like race or sex, is not.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 24, 2015

Forty years ago, the suggestion that nonhuman animals have moral rights—indeed, many of the same rights as human beings—would have been met with incredulous stares, if not outright ridicule. Fast forward to the present. Other results from this Gallup poll can be found here.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 24, 2015

Forty years ago, the suggestion that nonhuman animals have moral rights—indeed, many of the same rights as human beings—would have been met with incredulous stares, if not outright ridicule. Fast forward to the present. Other results from this Gallup poll can be found here. Note from KBJ: This post is by Mylan Engel.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

Yesterday, the world lost its most powerful voice for animal rights, Tom Regan. No one has done more to explain what "animal rights" means and why animals have rights than Tom Regan.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 18, 2007

Since a number of "Animal Ethics" readers reside in the northern Illinois area, I thought I would call your attention to an exciting lecture that is taking place on Northern Illinois University's campus. She specializes in Environmental Ethics, Human-Animal Ethics, and Moral Psychology. Jenni, Ph.D.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

Moral philosophers, even those belonging to the Critical School [the followers of Kant and Fries], have often represented duties to animals as indirect duties to oneself or to other men. Now, maltreatment of animals may have just that effect; nevertheless the argument in question takes no account of the whole truth.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 10, 2008

My basic moral position (as my emphasis on pleasure and pain and my quoting Bentham might have led Fox to suspect) is utilitarian. I make very little use of the word 'rights' in Animal Liberation , and I could easily have dispensed with it altogether. I have little to say about rights because rights are not important to my argument.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 17, 2008

The plea that animals might be killed painlessly is a very common one with flesh-eaters, but it must be pointed out that what-might-be can afford no exemption from moral responsibility for what-is. Henry S.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 31, 2009

I do not share the extreme vegetarian view that food reform is the foundation of other reforms, for I think it can be shown that all cruelties to animals, whether inflicted in the interests of the dinner-table, the laboratory, the hunting-field, or any other institution, are the outcome of one and the same error—the blindness which can see no unity (..)

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Animal Ethics

JULY 24, 2012

The initial attractiveness of utilitarianism as a moral theory on which to rest the call for the better treatment of animals was noted in an earlier context. Because animals are sentient (i.e., Because animals are sentient (i.e.,

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 7, 2016

It is estimated that due to conflicts with humans, the bushmeat and body parts trade, disease and habitat destruction, large mammals in Africa may be extinct by the end of this century. Michelle Nadon, Aurora, Canada To the editor: Bars? Have op-ed article writers Peter Singer and Karen Dawn not seen the beautiful natural habitat at the L.A.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 11, 2013

I do not know that it can be better done than in the words of George Nicholson, one of those early pioneers to the influence of whose writings, though now almost forgotten, the cause of humaneness owes so much. "In

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Animal Ethics

JULY 14, 2012

The legal rights individuals have arise as the result of the creative activity of human beings. The concept of moral rights differs in important ways from that of legal rights. The concept of moral rights differs in important ways from that of legal rights. First, moral rights, if there are any, are universal.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 2, 2011

I propose that the moral significance of the suffering, mutilation, and death of non-human animals rests on the following, which may be called the overflow principle: Act towards that which, while not itself a person, is closely associated with personhood in a way coherent with an attitude of respect for persons.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

There are also some things we cannot learn by using humans, if we respect their rights. The rights view merely requires moral consistency in this regard. ( Tom Regan , The Case for Animal Rights , updated with a new preface [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004], 388 [first edition published in 1983])

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 3, 2013

Eating meat and using mousetraps are as different (morally speaking) as night and day. Using a mousetrap can be justified by defense of self or property (though there are more humane ways of getting rid of pests). This shows that Kristof has not given much serious thought to the topic of the moral status of animals.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2009

on the principle that animals are morally equivalent to humans." Vegetarianism is based on the principle that animals matter, morally. It says nothing about whether animals are "morally equivalent" to humans (whatever that means). This man argues that vegetarianism is immoral.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 10, 2009

Does my proposal as to what makes killing another human being generally a major moral wrong in any way help us with deciding what, if anything, is wrong with killing non-human animals and foetuses? Systematic cullings in the absence of feasible alternatives, therefore, may be morally permissible.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 23, 2009

When it is asked whether animals have rights, and whether human beings have duties to them, the question, I think, is partly moral and partly verbal. Let us consider the moral question first. It is this latter view, I believe, that is in the minds of some of those who deny that animals have rights.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 4, 2008

If Smith thinks that plant rights and animal rights stand or fall together, then he is confused, for there is a morally relevant difference between plants and animals, namely, that only the latter are sentient. Addendum: Smith appears not to understand the animal-rights movement. Animals have weight on the moral scale.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 23, 2008

Under the moral law, all beings who have interests are subjects of rights, while all those who in addition to having interests, are capable of grasping the demands of duty, are subjects of duties. The defining characteristic of moral agency is autonomy ("rational self-determination"). Nonhuman animals (even apes) are in category 3.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 15, 2009

They are dismissed by some as a "Eurocentric illusion," and praised by others as the answer to the problem of humanity's survival. Note 2 from KBJ: Kant denied moral status to nonhuman animals. Our duties to them, he argued, are actually duties to particular human beings. One does not answer problems.

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